The goal of this repository is to have a one stop destination for anyone looking for a color palette to use in r. If you would like to help/contribute please feel free post an issue, PR or send a email to emilhhvitfeldt@gmail.com.
Further down the page is all the palettes available in the R ecosystem ordered alphabetically by package name. A list of palettes ordered by type can be found here Type sorted palettes to shorten the length of this page.
I have collected all the palettes displayed here in a single package using a unified framework. Developmental version can be found here.
You can install the released version of paletteer from CRAN with:
If you want the development version instead then install directly from GitHub:
Here is a collection of material on the use and creation of color palettes in r.
The purpose of this project is to showcase the palettes already available in R (packages). However sometimes you have to resort to make one yourself. When that is the case the following packages aides in creating.
When creating color palettes certain website have also provided valuable
Selecting a color palette requires a number of different considerations. Within these considerations is
In the following I have outlined a couple of those problems
While most of the palettes presented here contains a wide variety of colors. While that is compelling, you need to remember that your product might be printed in black and white one day, and you should pick a palette that allows for interpretation if that is the case.
First example is the rainbow palette from the
grDevices package with its colorful display. However as we
see here would it be horrible if used for black and white printing since
different colors are mapped to the same shade of grey.
A related problem happens with the standard color palette used in
ggplot2 since that color is picked to have constant chroma
and luminance thus yielding the same shade of grey when desaturated.
(This palette is no longer the default for continuous variables in
ggplot2 after version 3.0.0)
One of the continuous palette that satisfy this criteria is the well
known viridis palettes.
To test if the palette you want to use will be distorted when in
black and white, use the colorspace::desaturate() to
desaturate it.
Another thing you have to take into consideration when picking a palette is how it would be viewed by a person who is color blind. There are several approaches to ensuring that a colorblind person can interpret your figures. A very good summary of what you can do is given by Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito in their document “Color Universal Design (CUD) - How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people”. Beyond using shapes, linetypes and size for information coding, which is easily done using the ggplot2 aesthetics, they recommend:
The easiest way to make color coding accessible to everyone, is using a palette, that is unambiguous to people with various types of color blindness. There are a few available:
ggthemes package (also see colorblind_pal
palette among the ggthemes palettes in the alphabetical list below) or
by using the encoding provided by the Cookbook
for R.ggplot2’s
scale_colour_brewer() et al. or through the separate package RColorBrewer.To visualize the effect of color blindness on our palettes we will
turn to two packages. The dichromat package can simulate
color blindness on individual color and then also entire palettes like
so in this rainbow palette:
Another package that can provide helpful is the amazing colorblindr package
that is able to simulate color blindness to ggplot objects
them self.
Due to the somehow vague notion of “color palette” have I decided to exclude certain kinds of packages from the main gallery. Generative package have been discussed earlier.
The amazing cpt-city is a wonderful project of creating an archive of color palettes to be used in cartography, technical illustration and design. Due to the immense size (7140) I have decided to refer to it instead of re-illustration them in this repository. If any of the palettes found here are for your liking they can be accessed in R using the following package:
Many of the palettes in sports related palettes have a very limited number of colors (often only 2 colors). This leads to quite low usability outside of the special area of sports analytic.
colorr Color palettes for EPL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL teams.
beanumber/teamcolors An R package providing color palettes for pro sports teams.
The ggthemes package include the 150 four-color palettes
from the canva.com. Doe to the size and limited
number of colors in the palettes these palettes will be featured on
their own page and only once.
# Developmental version
pak::pak("BlakeRMills/MetBrewer")
# CRAN version
install.packages("MetBrewer")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("kevinsblake/NatParksPalettes")
# CRAN version
install.packages("NatParksPalettes")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("nrennie/PrettyCols")
# CRAN version
install.packages("PrettyCols")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("karoliskoncevicius/basetheme")
# CRAN version
install.packages("basetheme")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("nschiett/fishualize")
# CRAN version
install.packages("fishualize")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("murrayjw/nbapalettes")
# CRAN version
install.packages("nbapalettes")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("frareb/palettesForR")
# CRAN version
install.packages("palettesForR")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("laurenoconnelllab/poisonfrogs")
# CRAN version
install.packages("poisonfrogs")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("Nowosad/rcartocolor")
# CRAN version
install.packages("rcartocolor")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("business-science/tidyquant")
# CRAN version
install.packages("tidyquant")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("leonawicz/trekcolors")
# CRAN version
install.packages("trekcolors")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("cherylisabella/vangogh")
# CRAN version
install.packages("vangogh")
# Developmental version
pak::pak("karthik/wesanderson")
# CRAN version
install.packages("wesanderson")
